100 Times Reproduction of Democracy

In 2013, the filmmaker’s ownership of a work was revoked by his commissioners. In response, he distributed 100 copies of the award certificate and re-rendered the film 100 times on DVD, the quality of each successive version increasingly degraded until the original work became unrecognisable. Each DVD was sold as an edition of the film for 100 baht. The performance is compared to the replacement of the Khana Ratsadon plaque—a symbol of democracy in Thailand — with a royalist plaque after it mysteriously vanishes. But it is resurrected in various guises and contexts, including the aforementioned DVD. By destabilising the notion of authenticity, this tongue-in- cheek docufiction embraces meaning-making from below as resistance in a totalitarian regime.